


Flew Away or Started Sinking

by boombangbing



Series: Flew Away [1]
Category: Incredible Hulk (2008), The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-21
Updated: 2012-10-21
Packaged: 2017-11-16 18:05:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/542297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boombangbing/pseuds/boombangbing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce comes back to New York eight months after Tony dropped him off at a ferry terminal, with a nasty cough, no money, and nowhere to stay. Jane answers his shot in the dark phonecall, and suddenly he's helping to build wormholes while S.H.I.E.L.D. are quietly watching his every move.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Flew Away or Started Sinking

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by a prompt at avengerskink, although it doesn't follow it at all, I'm afraid. I just saw Bruce/Jane and my brain said 'YES'.
> 
> Title from Fun's _Stars_.
> 
> (There's probably going to be a second part, whenever I feel compelled to procrastinate over term papers.)

Bruce leaves. Tony takes him to a ferry terminal, presses a fancy watch and a roll of bills that Bruce later discovers are several different currencies – British pounds, Euros, pesos, quetzals, reals – into his hand and wishes him a safe trip. With that and the duffel bag full of food and clothes for every kind of weather that Natasha gave him, he feels almost happy. It's a feeling he hasn't had in a long time. It's the best he's going to get.

Bruce arrives. Eight months and a week later he's freezing and soaked to the bone outside the rebuilt and better than ever Stark Tower, vicious New York rain making mincemeat of his battered and too large sneakers. The rain has straightened out his hair that's already too long, and it hangs in front of his face stubbornly, while his chest rumbles with a nasty cough that he picked up while treating people in the Dominican Republic. Doctor, heal thyself, indeed.

He squelches his way into the lobby of the tower and up to the main desk.

“Name?” the receptionist asks.

“I was just wondering if--” He stops a moment to cough, and the receptionist blinks a little harder. “--Mr Stark was here.”

“Name?” she repeats and locks eyes with him.

He takes a rattling breath. “Bruce Banner.”

She flicks her eyes to her computer and taps away at it. “Sorry,” she says, flicking her eyes back to him, “You don't have an appointment.”

“I know that. I'm a friend. Can't I just... go up and knock on the door?”

She looks at him as if he's some random lunatic off the street. Which is mostly accurate, as it happens. “I'm sorry, sir, only authorised visitors are allowed past the lobby.”

“Fine,” he concedes. He can feel water pooling in his shoes. “Can I use the bathroom?”

“Authorised visitors only,” she repeats blandly.

“I guess I have no chance asking to borrow a phone, do I?” he asks.

“I'm sorry, sir,” she says, tipping her head to one side. Yeah, she sounds sorry. 

He turns around and leaves, taking petty satisfaction from the wet trail he leaves behind him. It's short-lived once he's outside, though. He's back where he began. He doesn't have a lot of people he can call, and he imagines that Steve, Clint, and Natasha probably aren't listed in the phone book. Betty briefly flits through his mind, but he dismisses the thought; it's been almost three years since he last saw her. He's changed, and not for the better.

The only person he can think of is Erik. He only got to see him for a few hours after everything was over; Bruce wanted to leave as soon as he could, and Erik was being taken back to S.H.I.E.L.D. for 'questioning'. Bruce felt bad for his old friend, but he was relieved to not be in the same position.

Most likely, Erik isn't in the city; after what he went through, he should really be on vacation to some tropical island for the foreseeable future. But Bruce has a quarter in his pocket and it's worth a shot.

He pointlessly covers his head with his hands and crosses the street to a sad looking phone booth. He picks up the receiver and pauses; he'll have to call Culver to get Erik's number, but hell if he can remember _Culver's_ number. So he's going to have to call the directory, too, all on one quarter. Well, he's faced more challenging problems.

Directory puts him through to Culver, and after much umming and erring, the physics department at Culver tells him that Erik is on a research sabbatical. Bruce almost bashes his head into the phone booth, but then the guy adds that they seem to have a number for him at a lab in New York.

Bruce repeats to back to himself about ten times before he dials, then crosses his fingers behind his back.

“Hello?” a woman's voice answers.

“Oh, hi.” Bruce's heart sinks – maybe he dialled wrong. “I don't suppose, uh, there's a Dr Selvig where you are, is there?”

“He's actually away visiting family at the moment,” she says.

“Oh,” Bruce sighs, then gets caught in another coughing fit. 

“Um, do you want to leave a message?” she asks hesitantly.

“No, it's okay,” he mutters.

“Well... he'll want to know who was calling for him,” she says. “What's your name?”

“I--” Exactly how many people is he going to tell his name to today? He sighs, and rubs his face, trying to get some blood flowing again. “Bruce.”

“Bruce,” she repeats, “okay, I'll... wait. Bruce _Banner_?”

He almost hangs up right then and there. It's probably fucking _S.H.I.E.L.D_ , what was he thinking?

“ _One minute remaining_ ,” a bland voice says on the line.

“I, uh, the- the lady's telling me that my money's almost run out, I should--” He's cut off by yet another coughing fit, even more miserable than the last.

“You sound terrible,” the woman says, “and you're calling from a pay phone? Tell me where you are.”

“What?” he asks, taking a rattling breath.

“You're using a pay phone, in the rain, sounding like you're about to die, and no one's seen you in almost a year. You're Erik's friend and I'm going to come pick you up.”

This woman seems to know an awful lot about him, considering how he doesn't even know her name.

“ _Thirty seconds remaining_.”

He grimaces. All paranoia aside, he's pretty sure that if he doesn't get out of the cold soon, his cough is going to turn into full blown pneumonia.

“Vanderbilt and East 45th Street,” he says weakly.

“Okay, stay there, I'm--” The line goes dead, and Bruce replaces the receiver with a deep sigh. This is a terrible, terrible idea. And he still doesn't know her name.

He ducks into a store doorway, and gets unpleasant looks from the security guard standing there. _Too bad_ , he thinks, and the other guy rumbles in his head. _Not now_ , he tells him.

He's not sure how long to wait for his mystery woman, or how long it'll be before the cops come to move him on. He hopes that the former's shorter than the latter.

The former, it seems, is twenty five minutes, just as his feet are starting to go numb. A van that looks about as battered as he feels trundles slowly down the street, coming to a stop near the intersection. The door opens and a girl – woman – jumps out, wrapped in a large, puffy coat. She slams the door closed, and it springs back open immediately, so she shoulder checks it closed and blows hair from her face. It brings a smile to his face.

She squints at the people passing on the sidewalk – he doesn't wave to her because he's not _absolutely_ certain that she's who he thinks she is – until she lights on him. Apparently she knows what he looks like, because she comes straight at him.

“Dr Banner?” she asks, looking him up and down, from his dripping hair to his sodden shoes.

“Hi,” he says.

“I'm Jane,” she says, and takes hold of his arm.

“Okay,” he mumbles as she pulls him back over to the van. She sends him around to get in the passenger side. “I'm going to get your van wet,” he says.

She looks pointedly at the candy wrappers carpeting the well of the van, and he smiles. “Oh,” he says, and climbs in, slamming the door closed behind him.

“Get that top off,” she says, pulling her arms from the sleeves of her coat.

“Um.”

She smiles cheerfully. “I'd say take everything off, but I don't want you to get charged with public indecency. The shoes need to go, though.”

“Uh.”

“You're halfway to pneumonia already,” she says, sliding into disapproval.

“Well,” he says, and then starts coughing. His body is, as always, a traitor. He nods his agreement as he attempts to catch his breath. She waits fairly patiently until he's done, then holds her hands out for his drenched collection of clothes. It takes him a few confused minutes to get them off, they're so wet and stuck to his skin, and he apologetically hands them to Jane, who unceremoniously drops them in the back, where they send things clattering.

“Put this on,” she says, tossing her coat into his lap.

“Oh, no, it's okay,” he replies. He takes a moment to wonder at the bizarreness of the situation at hand: he's shirtless (which isn't much to look at, and can't be any fun for Jane) and ill, sitting in a stranger's car, with said stranger insisting he wear her clothes.

“It's Erik's, put it on,” she says, and starts the van. The heat blasts on and he starts shivering. The coat feels very soft and warm when he squeezes it in his hands. Maybe just for five minutes... He toes his shoes and socks off, and pulls the coat on. Jane smiles smugly.

It doesn't make him feel much better, though. In fact, he starts shivering so hard that his teeth clatter against each other. “Sh-shit,” he stammers.

“Do you want me to turn the heat up?”

“No, it's-- it's okay,” he says. He zips the coat up and tucks his nose into the collar, peering out at the road.

At some point he zones out, because the next thing he knows Jane is nudging his shoulder and when he looks up, he finds that they're in a parking lot. He starts and bangs his side into the door.

“Sorry!” Jane says, holding her hands out, palms up. “I didn't mean to... I didn't mean to scare you.”

She's the one who's scared, he can tell; her eyes are bright with it, and he can't stop his mind from pointing out how small and fragile she is. She could snap in two so easily.

“You didn't, _you didn't_. Look, thanks for the ride but--”

“Okay. Hey, I just did a grocery store run yesterday, it's like a candy store in the lab right now,” she says, blithely ignoring him. She hops out of the van and comes round to his side, waiting for him to sort himself out. He steps down next to her, grunting at the cold concrete on his bare feet.

“Are you going to be okay without shoes?” she asks.

“I've walked barefoot on worse,” he says. Jane just raises her eyebrows and leads the way to the elevator. 

It's awkward. Bruce puts his hands in the pockets of the coat, finds more candy wrappers, some tissues, and at least a couple dollars worth of change. He pulls out a handful and looks at it; Jane smiles uncomfortably. He puts it back.

“So,” he says after a minute. “You run this lab with Erik?”

“Yeah, we're working on getting the Einstein-Rosen Bridge up and running.”

“A wormhole? I didn't realise that was past the theoretical stages. Sorry, my astrophysics is a little rusty.”

She smiles. “It wasn't, until recently.”

“Thor?” he asks, taking the gamble that she knows about him. If she doesn't, he does an excellent impression of a madman.

She drops her gaze to the floor. “Yeah. Oh, this is our stop,” she adds, stepping out.

He follows her down a hallway until she stops at an unmarked door. Not suspicious at all. She swipes a card through the wall mounted reader, and the door clicks open.

It is _a lot_ bigger on the inside. Jane grins when he mutters this to himself.

“There's a shower in the back,” she says, pointing him in the right direction.

He stays in there for close to forty five minutes, all told, long after all the accumulated dirt of his trek back to New York has washed down the drain. Five minutes in, Jane taps on the door and tells him she's left some clothes for him, and he mumbles something vaguely affirmative in response and goes back to enjoying the hot spray. When he finally gets out, he cracks the door ever so slightly, and finds a pile of clothes and towels, with a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste on top. He dries himself off and does his teeth, looking at himself in the mirror. He really is skinny as fuck these days, and looking _old_ to boot.

When he's done he pulls on the sweatpants – only just held up with the drawstrings pulled as tight as they'll go – and fleece hoodie that she's left for him, and wanders out to find her. It's not hard, he just follows the sounds of clattering and finds her in a small kitchen, bent over, poking at a microwave.

“Hey,” he says quietly.

She looks over her shoulder. “You're looking a little brighter. I don't suppose you know how to work microwaves, do you?”

He holds up his hands. “I'm not that kind of scientist.”

“Mm, I used to have an assistant that did this stuff, but she went off to grad school.” She straightens up and tugs her t-shirt down ('I'm going to the Disneyland Resort!'). “Really inconsiderate. How about some toast? I can work the toaster, most of the time.”

“Toast is great. I mean, you've already been too kind, you don't have to--”

“I found some Robitussin in the cupboard,” she says over him. “It tastes god awful, but it does the job.”

“Thanks,” he murmurs.

He takes a little bit too much of it, he guesses, because twenty minutes later he's sitting on a couch that has no right being as comfortable as it is, struggling to keep his eyes open. Jane dumps a soft blanket on top of him, and that seals it; he lists sideways and is out for the count. 

He feels warm the next time he opens his eyes; there's a pillow beneath his head, the blanket is spread out over him, the other guy is less pissed about everything, and he can take a breath without doubling over. It's almost dark in the lab, just a few soft lights illuminating the place, giving everything a blurry quality. It takes him a minute to realise that he's not wearing his glasses any more; he tips his head back and finds that they're folded up on the coffee table by the couch.

Jane is hunched over a desk a little distance from him, scratching away at something with her pen. When he sits up with a huff, she blinks at him owlishly.

“Oh! How are you feeling?”

“Uh, a little stoned,” he says slowly, and smiles. “What time is it?”

“It's, uh...” She checks her watch. “Huh, it's two.”

“In the morning?” he asks.

“Yeah...” she murmurs. She looks up at him and smiles. She seems to be a very smiley person. “I'd better get some sleep, I guess.”

He looks at his makeshift bed, then back at her.

“Don't worry, there's a cot in the back. Unless you'd prefer it, I don't mind.”

“No, no, this is-- I'm fine here. Unless you want the couch instead?”

She shakes her head, laughing a little. “No, it's fine.” She stands up and stretches her arms over her head – there's an audible pop of her shoulder blades that he hears from where he's sitting. “Well, feel free to eat anything edible you find in the kitchen.”

“Okay.” He's bunching the blanket up between his hands, he realises, and forces himself to stop and smooth it out again. “Thank you, you know, for...”

“I'd never have heard the end of it from Erik if I hadn't.”

“Yeah, he can be a bit... grouchy.”

“Yeah,” she agrees and tucks some hair behind her ear. “Well, good night, Dr Banner.”

“Morning,” he says reflexively.

She smiles again and disappears into the back of the lab, switching the lights off as she goes.

He should leave. He could leave a note thanking her for her kindness and slip out; he's very quiet, he's been likened to a mouse more than once. It seems to have stopped raining outside, from what he can see, squinting in the dark at the window. Maybe he could filch some food off her first, she probably wouldn't mind.

He's just so tired, though, and definitely a little stoned. He could stay till morning, he thinks, get up and sneak out before she wakes up, he's an early riser, and then, at least, it'll be light and maybe little warmer. It's a more sensible plan than going out into the cold and dark, especially since he's not even sure where he is right now.

He nods to himself, feeling less anxious having made a decision, and lies back down.

It's just beginning to get light when he wakes up again, probably no later than six. He sits up a little easier this time, though there's a tickle in his throat again and he feels like hell, and grabs his glasses off the table before tiptoeing into the kitchen.

Where Jane is standing in fuzzy pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt.

“Oh,” he says, and she starts a little. At least he still has his mouse-like qualities intact.

“Good morning, Dr Banner,” she says. He almost expects her to add, 'the earth says hello', but she's probably too young to remember that, he guesses.

“Hi. What time is it?”

“About... six thirtyish?”

He fidgets with the baggy sweatpants he's wearing. “I thought you'd still be asleep.”

She shrugs. “I don't need a lot of sleep.”

“I used to be like that. Then I got old.”

She laughs and turns to open a cupboard door. “Do you want some coffee? Tea?” She picks up a bottle of something vaguely grey in colour. “Whatever this is?”

“Um, coffee? If it's not too much trouble.”

She shakes her head, and waves to a rickety looking table. “Sit down,” she says, grabs a spatula from the rack and points it at him. “I'm going to make eggs. Do you like eggs?”

“Yeah.”

The coffee's kind of awful, but the eggs are good. The tickle in his throat is getting stronger, but he manages to swallow it away. They sit across from each other, and chew in uncomfortable silence for a couple of minutes, before Jane clears her throat determinedly.

“So, where were you coming from?” she asks.

“From?” he repeats.

“Before you were standing in the rain like a bedraggled cat,” she clarifies.

“Oh, that. I was in the Dominican Republic.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Well...” He lays his knife and fork down on the empty plate, exactly parallel to each other. “It is, it's a beautiful place, but uh. Nicer when you know where you're going to be sleeping every night, I guess.”

“Is that why you're back in New York?”

“Well, yeah, ran out of money, and... got lonely...” He stops to cough, but of course what he hopes will be a polite clearing of the throat turns into a chest-rattling hack. “And ill,” he adds ruefully, once he's regained the power of speech.

“That sounds terrible. You should really see a doctor about that,” she says.

“I am a doctor.”

“Not that kind.”

“People don't tend to get the difference.”

She rolls her eyes. “Tell me about it.”

“You're a doctor?”

“Of astrophysics, for the last three years.” She pushes back from the table and picks up the plates.

“Let me--” he starts, but she waves him off. “So, that's how you know Erik?”

“Yeah, he and my dad were best friends, so I asked him to be my doctoral advisor.”

Bruce raises his eyebrows. “He must like you, he hated doing those things when I knew him.”

“I'm pretty sure he hated every minute of it.” She drops the plates and cutlery into the sink with a thunk, and runs the water. “So, you were pretty close to Stark Tower yesterday, were you looking for him?”

“Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking, a guy can't just swan in there without a full cavity search.” He finishes with a cough, and smiles. “What a treat I was for the receptionist.”

“I can try to get hold of him, if you want.”

“You know Tony?”

“Not personally, but I'm sure S.H.I.E.L.D. can find it in themselves to call him for us.”

Despite the warm clothes and the central heating, he feels himself go cold at the mention of S.H.I.E.L.D. He'd thought it, hadn't he, that she might be S.H.I.E.L.D., and now he's finding himself at a distinct disadvantage: no clothes, sick, and tired.

Jane notices his long silence and wrinkles up her nose. “We're S.H.I.E.L.D. 'sponsored', I'm sorry, I should have let you know.”

“No, uh, it's fine, I should just get going, thank you for the food. And the couch.” He pushes his chair back from the table and gets two steps away from it before a wave of dizziness hits him so hard that he backs up and sits down again before he collapses. “Um.”

“Look, I'll tell them I want to consult with him or something,” she says, “I won't mention you.” 

She leaves the room in search of her phone before he can point out that they already know he's there. He thinks about getting up for a second, but the kitchen is starting to blur a little, and the best option seems to be putting his arms on the table and resting his head in them. When he opens his eyes again it's to the soft whirring of the coffee maker, and he knows immediately that he's lost time. He rolls his head to one side and looks at Jane, blinking away sleep.

“Dr Banner, you're awake again,” she says, smiling softly.

“Bruce,” he mumbles, and she smiles wider.

“I called S.H.I.E.L.D.; apparently Stark is abroad for the next month.”

“Fuck,” he mutters to himself, then lifts his head and pulls a face. “Sorry... What time is it?”

“Just after ten,” she says, taking her cup of coffee from the machine. “Why don't you come sit on the couch? That doesn't look comfortable.”

He pushes himself up against the protest of his back and nods. “Sure.”

The main area of the lab has exploded into flurry of paper, stacks of them everywhere, and equations drawn all over the whiteboard mounted on one wall. They almost make sense to him, but his brain is just too foggy to work it out.

“I had a breakthrough,” she says.

“I see that...” He sits down heavily on the couch and can't stop himself from leaning back into the soft cushion and sighing.

“Why don't you take some more Robitussin and get some more sleep?” she asks gently.

That sounds like a really, _really_ good idea right about now. About the best idea in the world, actually. But he shouldn't, he _shouldn't_ , it's not safe to stay in a place like this, with S.H.I.E.L.D. agents around all the corners.

“I shouldn't, I should...” He rubs his palms over his face and sighs. “I don't know what I should do,” he mumbles.

“Take some medicine and sleep,” Jane says, tossing the bottle to him. He doesn't even try to catch it; it bounces off his chest and falls into his lap. “Sorry.”

He smiles and scratches the back of his head. “Okay, yeah.”

-

He wakes up being nudged in the shoulder. He startles a little, uncurling from his foetal position. Jane is standing a couple of feet from the couch, looking nervous and determined.

He levers himself up on his elbow. “I'm not gonna...”

“No, I know.” She chews on a nail for a second before smiling awkwardly. “I need to go home and do some stuff.”

“Oh, I-- I'll--”

“I have a futon,” she says quickly, while shrugging. “You could stay on it.”

“In your apartment?”

“Yeah.”

He shakes his head. “You've been really kind, but...”

“It's snowing.”

“It is?” He leans to one side and squints out the window. It is. “You really want a strange man sleeping on your futon?”

“You're not strange.”

He cocks an eyebrow and snorts. “What kind of people do you know?”

Jane shrugs. “Look, I'd be a really shitty person to let you go out in this weather with no money and no proper clothes and, well, we have met before, you know.”

“We have?”

She crosses her arms over her chest and leans against a drafting table. “Yeah. The faculty had a mixer for the grad students. You were talking to Erik and I sort of stood awkwardly adjacent to the two of you.”

He frowns, trying to sift through memories of the many mixers he went to in his illustrious career at Culver. “I... don't remember that.”

“You were pretty wrapped up in Dr Ross, I think. And I wasn't very memorable.”

Betty. Bruce's heart slides into his feet, it feels like. He twists his fingers in the bottom of his hoodie and takes an unsteady breath.

Jane clears her throat. “ _Anyway_ , I'm not taking 'no' for an answer.”

He runs his fingers up and down the zipper, nails catching on the teeth. “Well... I guess I don't have a choice then.”

-

She gives him fresh sheets, a squashy cushion, and her old boyfriend's clothes that make him look like a kid dressing up in his father's clothes.

“You dated a giant?” he asks, fiddling with the bottom of the shirt he's wearing – it hits mid-thigh and hangs baggy from his shoulders.

“I have a type,” she says, with a slight drawl that suggests a joke that Bruce isn't getting.

The kitchen here is a little better equipped, though not by a wide margin, and there's what looks like a curbside TV in the corner of the living room with a stack of books on top.

“Feel free to watch stuff on it,” she says. “The picture's not very good, though.”

“Do they still make _The Wire_? I liked that show.”

“I think it got cancelled or something,” she says, handing him a pair of socks.

He looks at them sceptically; he could probably wear one of them as a hat. “Oh.”

He means to leave the next day. He means to get up in the middle of the night, fold up the blankets and sheets, leave a thank you note, and slip out into that good night.

He sleeps until eleven.

He _really_ means to leave the day after _that_ , but... Jane buys bagels from a local place and he is suddenly ravenously hungry that morning, between his coughing fits. She pushes a bottle of non-drowsy cough medicine across the table to him.

“I really think you should have a doctor check out that cough. You might need antibiotics.”

He wipes his hand across the back his mouth and shakes his head. “The other guy, he won't let anything... really bad happen to me.”

“'Other guy'?”

“The--” He taps his head, drawing her eyes up.

“Huh, so is he like a separate entity? Do you have two consciousnesses in your head? Is it...” She pauses and smiles. “I'm sorry, those are kind of private questions, aren't they?”

He shrugs. “It's okay. He's like... to get Freudian on you, he's the Id and I'm the Super-ego.”

“So, he's not...?”

“No, he's...” It's been so long now, Bruce has learnt to disassociate himself with the other guy. No one's ever really questioned it before. Unsurprising, since he never interacted with people long enough to give them the chance. “We're the same person.” His stomach twists with the confession.

She nods thoughtfully. “Everyone's calling him-- you, the 'Hulk'.”

“Yeah. It's as good a name as any, I guess. I find it kind of funny, though, 'cause I really couldn't have been called 'hulking' for most of my life.”

She smiles. “You're bigger on the inside.”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“Have another bagel,” she says.

He gives up 'meaning to' by day five. Jane drags him out to buy clothes – where it feels like everyone's staring, but probably only because he's a guy who looks homeless with a pretty, young woman – then back to the lab.

“You have a PhD in nuclear physics, right?” she asks.

“Yeah?”

She hauls a box up from the floor and puts it on the table in front of him. “Then you can work out how to create enough power to open a bridge to Asgard.”

He leans over and peers in the box. “Okay?”

“I'm not letting you stay with me out of the goodness of my heart,” she says sniffily, even though they both know that she _is_.

He lifts the corner of a stack of paper. “Isn't any of this stuff... digitised?”

She pulls her hair back into a ponytail and secures it with a rubber band. “I don't want S.H.I.E.L.D. to be able to monitor my work.”

“Good point.”

Jane flits between the table and the whiteboard, scrawling equations on it then going back to check her stacks of paper, then coming back to the board and starting all over again. It's exhausting just to watch.

The work is soothing, though. Aside from that little alien invasion, he hasn't had a chance to work like this in years, and especially when not under the threat of death and destruction. He can't drum up the levels of excitement for it that Jane has, or that he _used_ to have, but it still feels good to stretch himself.

“Coffee break,” Jane says an indeterminate amount of time later. A cup appears in his line of vision and lands in front of him. He looks up and notices that it's getting dark outside.

“Thanks,” he says and pushes his hair back from his face, not that it accomplishes much. He pulls on a wayward curl and it stubbornly springs back into place. “I need a haircut.”

“Don't look at me,” she says, and leans her hip against the table next to him as she scans his work. “So, what do you think? Do you think it'll work?”

“It could.” He taps a sheet of paper. “You'd need an unheard of level of nuclear fission, which is possible, but radiation is going to be a big problem. Or you need some new power source. The Tesseract would have done it.”

“But Thor took it,” she says.

“Yeah.”

She sighs and hops up onto the table. “It doesn't matter what I build if we can't power it up.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what do I do?”

“Create another power source.”

“Just like that?”

He shrugs. “Why not?”

She shakes her head. “It's a hell of a lot of work.”

“Yeah, but you'll do it.”

“How do you know?”

He lifts his shoulders again. “Just a feeling I have.”

-

He cuts his hair the next day, over Jane's bathroom sink with a pair of paper cutting scissors, and it looks _terrible_. Jane laughs and flicks an errant curl with the end of her pen.

“It'll grow,” is her pronouncement.

-

They discover that they both did their undergrad at Harvard, and trade stories about the science faculty that make Bruce feel very old. Jane's memories of pulling pranks on MIT and Yale are a lot more vivid then his, in particular one story involving several chickens, some ladies undergarments, and a few cans of paint. Bruce laughs so hard that he starts coughing helplessly. It feels really good to laugh, aside from the unpleasant rattling sound his chest is making. 

They're both so wrapped up in the story and Bruce's possible death by asphyxiation that neither of them hear the door until it slams closed.

His body snaps into alert mode; he's on his feet and Jane is close behind him as he retreats to press himself against a wall. There's no good way out of the lab, as far as he can tell, and he's kicking himself for not casing the place properly earlier. Jane worries her lip and looks around.

“Jane, are you here?” a voice calls. Erik. Bruce sags with relief.

He huffs a laugh, and Jane squeezes his shoulder before calling, “You're not supposed be back for another week!”

“There's only so much of my mother's soup and good intentions I can take,” he grumbles, rounding the corner into the room. “Lucky S.H.I.E.L.D. were paying for my flights... Bruce? _Bruce_?”

Jane's still got her hand on his shoulder, he realises; she lets go and Erik grins, crossing the room with just a couple of his ridiculously long strides, and envelops him in a hug.

“Hi,” Bruce murmurs.

Erik steps back and holds Bruce's shoulders. “You're looking good, Bruce.”

He knows that's a lie. 

“Yeah, you too.” 

Another lie.

“So, what are you doing here? How long have you been in New York?”

“About... a week and a half?” he says, looking at Jane. She nods.

“Where are you staying? God, if I'd known you were here, I'd've left my mother's sooner.”

“That's okay...” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I've actually... been staying on Jane's futon.”

Erik's eyebrows go high. “Really? I didn't realise that you two knew each other.”

“We didn't.”

“He didn't have anywhere to go, what was I meant to do?” Jane says, tilting her chin up just a little.

“Well, I have a whole spare bedroom,” Erik says, “you can stay with me until you find your feet. Are you going to be staying long term?”

“Um, I don't know, but uh...” He glances at Jane. Obviously it's better to get out of her hair before her goodwill runs dry, he just feels reluctant, for some reason. “I'll take you up on that offer, yeah.”

“Great,” Erik says, “we can pick your stuff up from Jane's later.”

“Oh, uh.” Bruce looks down at himself, and shrugs. “I come as I am.”

Jane claps her hands together before Erik can reply. “Let me show you what me and Bruce have been working on!” she says, and latches onto Erik's arm.

-

Erik has a nice apartment, with an actual bed and a mattress that's large enough for Bruce to stretch his arms and legs out. He sleeps terribly the first night. He's in good company, at least, as he runs into Erik pacing the hall when he slips out of his room to get a glass of water.

“Hey,” he says.

“Bruce,” he grunts, none of his earlier friendliness present.

“Are... you okay?”

Erik stares at him for a long second, before blinking and shaking his head. “I'm fine. Fine. It's late, what are you doing up?”

Bruce scratches the back of his head. “Thirsty.”

“Well, on your way then,” Erik says, waving his hand towards the kitchen.

Bruce shuffles off, guilty about being so glad that Erik lied to him.

He's back to normal the next day, if still a little more cheerful than Bruce knew him to be. Jane is considerably _less_ happy, though, and already in the lab when he and Erik get there.

“Good morning, starshine,” he says. He places a cup of Starbucks coffee they picked up on the way in down in front of her, and nudges her in the shoulder.

“Huh? Oh...” She smiles up at him and picks up the cup. “Thanks.”

“Erik paid for it.”

“But you gave it to me,” she says.

“I did,” he says, taking the seat next to her.

“So, how is it, staying with Erik?”

“It's fine. I think, uh, I don't think he got a lot of sleep last night, though. But then, people don't tend to, when I'm around.”

She rolls her eyes and gives him a light shove. “I'm sure it has nothing to do with you, bighead. Erik wasn't doing so well after... everything. The trip home was meant to help him, but...” She shrugs.

“Yeah... So, how's the work go--”

“Bruce! Jane!” Erik calls, cutting him off. Bruce's looks over his shoulder as Erik comes in, carrying a laptop. “I've got something to show you.”

“Okay?” Bruce says, watching as Erik comes around the table and puts the laptop down in front of them. The screen says '1995' in Comic Sans. Jane wrinkles her nose.

“I started going through my cupboards last night when I couldn't sleep,” he says, and Bruce and Jane share a look. “And I found this. The faculty converted all their VHS to DVD a few years back, and they sent out this compilation disc of our Christmas parties.” Bruce doesn't have time to register his complaint before Erik leans over and hits play.

“ _Are you filming this?_ ” someone asks as the camera pans around the poorly decorated room. Bruce remembers it well: the heating broke in there every winter, yet that was where they always had their Christmas parties. 

“Remember Hank?” Erik asks.

Bruce nods. “Yeah.” Hank does not look pleased to be filmed. “What's he doing these days?”

“His wife was killed a few years ago. He gave up work to devote all his time to 'research'.”

Bruce widens his eyes. “Christ,” he mutters.

The cameraman walks around the room, zooming in on people at random. Bruce recognises a lot of the faces, though he can't put names to half of them. Erik names some of them, pointing out to Jane people who she only knows in their current older forms.

“ _Erik, get over here!_ ” someone calls, and Jane laughs as he comes into the frame.

“I forgot you wore those huge glasses,” she says, “and you had _hair_.”

Erik runs a hand over his head. “Thanks.”

“ _So, how're you enjoying the party?_ ” the cameraman asks.

“ _Beer's terrible_ ,” he replies. 

“ _But you're still drinking it._ ”

“ _It's free._ ” 

Bruce smiles; that's the Erik he remembers.

A guy claps Erik on the shoulder, peering around him at the camera. He's tall, though not as tall as Erik, slim, with dark, thinning hair. Bruce vaguely recognises him. Jane takes a deep breath.

“Dad,” she murmurs.

“That's your dad?” he asks, looking between the screen and Jane, as her father laughs and jokes along with the cameraman. Bruce can see the resemblance now that he's looking for it.

“Yeah,” she says, and smiles weakly. “He was killed in a car crash a couple of months later.”

Jesus, now he remembers; he was the guy who died midway through the semester. Bruce didn't go to the funeral because he had midterms to give. His name was Dan, he thinks. Daniel Foster. “God, I'm sorry.”

Erik squeezes her hand and she shrugs. “It's okay.”

On the video, the younger Erik disappears from the frame for a second, then comes back with someone by the arm. Bruce recognises that hideously patterned shirt and braces for impact.

Jane laughs wetly as Bruce's young, baby-fat round face comes into view. “You had even _more_ hair,” she says.

He smiles and runs his fingers through his hair. “Yeah, it was a problem.” His younger self is a mish-mash of unruly curls, horrible clothes, and a wide-eyed look of terror. It certainly doesn't help that Erik has a good six or seven inches on him, and makes his younger self look even more like a child. Bruce was fairly terrified of Erik for at least the first couple of years that they knew each other.

“ _Enjoying the party, kid?_ ” the cameraman asks.

“ _Um, sure. Beer's good._ ”

Bruce had never got why they laughed at him for that, he remembers now.

“ _How did your first semester teaching go?_ ” Dan asks.

“ _Yeah, it's been okay. I've got over two hundred finals to mark, though..._ ”

“I hated teaching,” Bruce confides to Jane and Erik. “I was absolutely miserable doing it. My students walked all over me.”

“I hated it too,” Jane says, “but I was too impatient with them. 'Shrill', some said.”

“Students are always little shits on teaching evaluations,” Erik says.

“ _Where's he going?_ ” the cameraman asks, following Bruce as he crosses the room.

“ _Where'd you think?_ ” Dan replies. The cameraman zooms in on Bruce as he meets up with Betty at the door. She fiddles with his shirt, loosening his tie and generally trying to make him look less ridiculous – she despaired throughout their relationship of his fashion 'sense'.

“ _You really wouldn't know that he's one of those scary geniuses, huh?_ ” one of them says as Betty starts trying to tame his hair by combing her fingers through it.

It feels like his heart is stuttering in his chest as he looks at how happy he used to be with Betty, how he leaned into her touch, how he wasn't afraid of being touched; not by her, at least. It's like a physical pain, thinking about how thoroughly he's ruined his life.

“ _Have you seen his evaluations? He's doing terribly, his students treat him like shit and he just takes it._ ”

Bruce takes a deep breath and holds it for a second, then leans over and looks at Erik.

“That wasn't me,” Erik says.

“I don't think anyone else at Culver had a Norwegian accent,” Bruce says blandly before settling back to watch the video.

“ _He's definitely going to take over the world one day, though_ ,” Dan comments on the video as Bruce disappears out the door with Betty.

“My dad must have liked you,” Jane says, “he only said that about people he really liked.” Her eyes are a little red-rimmed, but she's smiling. He knocks his shoulder into hers and settles down to watch the rest of the video.

-

Erik has a lot of pictures from the 'old days', which he pulls out at regularly intervals over the next couple of weeks. Bruce never knew that he was so sentimental.

There aren't very many pictures of Bruce, because at least half of the time he made up some excuse to get out of get-togethers, and he hated having his photograph taken, he always looked like a deer caught in the headlights. Betty used to say that it was cute.

There are a couple, though, mostly _with_ Betty, that Erik gives him. It's difficult not to keep looking at them; he finds himself carrying them with him, pulling them out while he's working, or eating, or doing anything at all, really.

“What're you looking at?” Jane asks, dropping another box on the table and sliding it across to him. He tips it on its side and sighs; she has _a lot_ of handwritten research on possible power sources.

“Just pictures,” he says, handing them to her.

She takes them and smiles. “Aw,” she says, “you're so cute.”

“Thanks.” He takes the pictures back and smooths his thumb over their faces in the top one.

“When was the last time you saw her?” she asks.

He spares another few seconds for the pictures, then replaces them in his pocket. “About three years.”

Jane hums and pats his shoulder. He glances up and smiles.

“Are you going to go see her?”

“I dunno...” He takes a deep breath and lets it out. “So, what's this present you brought me?”

-

They have their first big breakthrough at the end of February. Jane goes out and buys a couple six-packs of beers in celebration.

“Do you drink?” she asks him.

“Whenever I get the chance,” he says, and she tosses him a can. Early on, he'd discovered that alcohol drowned out the noise in his head.

It's late when they work out how to get around the averaged null energy condition, and later still when they start drinking. Erik bows out after one beer, and Jane and Bruce jeer at him a bit as he leaves. He quite pointedly asks Bruce how he's going to get home, but Bruce is pleasantly buzzed enough to just shrug and slouch lower into the couch.

“I don't think he _approves_ ,” Bruce mumbles into his can after Erik's left, cutting a look at Jane.

“He's just jealous because we're young and cool,” she says, grinning. She scoots closer to him until their legs are pressed together and clinks their cans.

“Speak for yourself,” he says.

She smacks his arm. “You're not old.”

“I'm almost forty four,” he says, then narrows his eyes. “Wait a minute... what about cool?”

“Well...” she says and bites her lip.

“Oh, I see how it is,” he mutters.

“You make up for it by being so cute, though,” she says, and pinks immediately. She grabs another couple of cans from the coffee table and gives him one.

“You're trying to get me drunk...” he says, and drains his second can, placing it back on the table.

She leans over and cups her hand around his ear. “You're already drunk,” she tells him in a mock-whisper.

“Oh,” he says, tipping his head towards her. “That's what that is.”

Bruce tends to be a miserable drunk, was even before the other guy. Alcohol makes him miserable, and blunt, and even less socially adjusted than usual. He had to make a conscious choice to stop drinking alone, because he hardly needed to add 'sad alcoholic' to his laundry list of problems.

Jane's a happy drunk, though, happy to chat and hum songs under her breath that he doesn't know. She tells him about when she was at Harvard, doing her graduate studies at Culver. She tells him how close Erik and her dad were, that she used to think of him as an uncle when she was a kid, but now he's more of a father to her. Even when she gets onto sad topics, she talks about them happily. It's really quite admirable.

“But you know what moms are like,” she says, finishing a story about prom date disasters that he really _is_ listening to, but he's starting to feel a little vague. He's had six, maybe seven beers, and he always was a lightweight.

When he doesn't respond, her eyes go a little wider. “I'm sorry, are your parents...?”

It takes him a couple of seconds to work out what she's getting at. “Oh. Yeah, my mom died when I was eight.”

She lays a hand on his knee. “I'm so sorry.”

She sounds so open and sincere, and he's feeling so calm and tipsy, the next words just come out of his mouth with no prior examination. “My father killed her.”

Her face goes slack, fingers tightening around his knee. He smiles.

“I shouldn't have told you that. It's okay, you don't have to say anything. I don't tell people because what are you supposed to say to that?” It was at great personal angst and anxiety that he told Betty, all those years ago. It's what most of their fights stemmed from: when the subject of having kids came up, she used to tell him that it wasn't genetic; he said maybe that was true, maybe it _was_ learned behaviour. Maybe _he'd_ learned the behaviour.

“Bruce...”

“He's in the Ohio State Pen, has been since 1978. My mother tried to escape with me, and he came home early and... there was a trial, and...” He's really not sure why he's telling her this; her face has gone ashen, and he should stop, _stop it, Bruce_. “I've never told anyone except Betty, I just... told people they'd died in a car crash when I was a kid, people know what to do with that. I guess, though, some people probably knew already. Brian, my father, was a respected scientist, and Banner isn't that common a surname, I guess. That's why I stopped using my first name.”

“What's your first name?” she says quietly.

“Robert. All the articles at the time were about how renowned physicist Brian Banner had killed his wife and abused his son, little Bobby Banner. I didn't want to be abused little Bobby Banner any more. I heard my aunt say once that he'd experimented on me, but I don't know if that's true. Maybe that why I didn't die from the Gamma radiation, like I _should_ have, but I don't know.”

He lapses into silence and finishes his beer. “Brian was an alcoholic,” he observes at length.

“Bruce,” Jane says, her voice almost unbearably gentle, “what was your mother's name?”

“Rebecca. Why?”

She reaches up to cup his cheek. “You're crying.”

“I am?” He pats his cheek and his fingers come away wet. “Oh. Oops.”

“Can I...” she starts, dropping her palm to his neck. “Can I hug you?”

He shrugs. “Sure.”

She's too small to envelop him, but she does her level best anyway, despite the awkward angle they're at to each other. She squeezes his shoulders and he feels frozen, not completely sure of what's going on, although really he does know: people comfort you when you tell them about the horrible things that have happened to you and then start _crying_. That's compassion 101.

He places his hand carefully on her waist, flexing his fingers. He's crying even more now, he can feel it on his face, but he's disconnected from it. He knows that he's crying because he's sad, but the thing is, he doesn't feel sad, he feels pretty much the same as always, except a bit drunker. 

He wonders if it's the other guy who's sad.

Jane runs her hand over his hair, and he drops his chin to her shoulder.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“I guess I am,” he mumbles.

Her hand drops lower, stroking his back, and he suddenly feels so _tired_. He presses his forehead to the curve of her neck and sighs. She keeps stroking his back, until his eyelids feel too heavy to keep open any longer. He's not sure, but he thinks that she kisses him on his temple just as he drifts off.

He's horizontal when he wakes up, his knees pulled up to his chest, his cheek pillowed against something, one arm hanging off the edge of the couch. His eyes feel sore and itchy, his mouth is dry and tastes awful, and for a moment he doesn't know what's going on. He rolls over onto his back and looks up, at Jane, sleeping with her head tipped back against the couch.

Oh. He looks at his 'cushion' out of the corner of his eye. He's got his head in her lap, and she's taken his glasses off again, left them folded up on the coffee table. He cried himself to sleep, he thinks, frowning, and it's been _decades_ since that's happened.

He should definitely get up now. Jane must be uncomfortable like that; he should get up and resettle her in a better position, and drink as much coffee as possible to try to wash away the embarrassment and shame of telling her about Brian. God, even the thought of it now makes him want to throw up. Although that might have something to do with his hangover.

But... she's asleep, and maybe he'd wake her if he tried to move her. And maybe he just doesn't want to get up yet. It's still dark, and he's got at least a couple of hours of sleep left in him.

Jane sighs in her sleep, one hand pressing into his arm, and he makes the snap decision to leave his panic attack for tomorrow and go back to sleep.

He wakes for the second time to a door slamming in the lab; or, rather, he finds himself sitting up, hanging on to Jane's hand, blood pumping in his ears, a few seconds before he becomes aware of the noise that woke him.

Jane's fingers flex in his grip. “What's wrong?” she asks, voice rough.

He snaps his head back to her, and she starts, leaning away from him momentarily. The other guy is pressing against him, thrashing to be let out; he blinks hard, forcing him back. “Heard something,” he murmurs.

“What--” she starts, but the lights are switched on before she can finish. 

Erik walks in, looks at the two of them, rumpled and holding hands, and sighs. “Morning.”

“Yeah,” Bruce says, dropping Jane's hand, and levers himself off the couch. “I'm gonna put the coffee on.”

Jane joins him a couple of minutes later, shuffling in with a blanket around her shoulders.

“Three sugars,” she says, “if you're offering.”

“Sure,” he says, watching out of the corner of his eye as she opens the cupboard door next to him and digs around in there. “Um. I'm sorry about... about last night.”

“You don't have anything to be sorry for,” she says.

He snorts. “Well, I still shouldn't have laid all of that on you. And... I hope I didn't scare you before, with the...” He waves a hand towards his eyes.

She closes the door and turns to him, leans her hip against the counter. “Oh, you didn't, I was just surprised. Green suits you.”

He watches the coffee maker as it whirs along, catching his fingernails along a groove on the underside of the counter. “I don't know about that.”

“I do. Hey.” She taps him on the arm. “I'm not scared of you.”

“You should be.” He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, then back to the counter. “I am,” he mumbles.

Jane sighs, closing the short distance between them, while he keeps looking down at the counter. She wraps one arm around his waist and squeezes, her other hand resting on his shoulder. He's had more hugs in the last twelve hours than he has in the past three years.

“Thanks,” he says quietly, patting her arm.

“Jane,” Erik calls, “where're your notes on...” His voice fades a little as he steps into the room. 

“Hey,” Bruce says. Jane pulls back a little, returning her attention to foraging for food.

Erik nods. “Mm. Coffee ready yet?”

-

Bruce and Jane bicker sometimes. There's no other word for it, they just bicker until one of them acquiesces (normally Bruce), or they both go home grumpy and come back the next day embarrassed.

“There is _no way_ that a wormhole connected to nine separate points simultaneously would ever be stable. The lack of gravity alone!”

“It's already happened, that's how Yggdrasil works,” Jane says, sliding a book across the table to him. Erik has wisely ducked out to get food.

Bruce glances down at the book. “That's mythology, not science.”

“It's mythology _and_ science,” she argues. “I mean, really, you fought alongside a Norse god and you don't think that _maybe_ there's something to this stuff?”

“I don't think Thor's a god. He's an alien. Which is slightly less ridiculous.”

Jane purses her lips. “Don't be pedantic. The myth of Yggdrasil is still based in fact, the _fact_ of Thor's alien world.”

He shrugs. “I just think it's a stretch.”

“Well, I'll tell Thor that you think he's wrong about his own realm's science, next time I see him,” she says, bending over her notebook.

“He told you this personally?” Bruce asks, tone hovering somewhere between joking and honestly curious.

“Yes,” Jane says, not looking up.

Bruce opens his mouth, closes it again, then says, “Oh, I didn't realise that you knew him that well.”

“I knew him better than Erik did,” she mutters.

“Oh...”

Jane's tapping out a tattoo with her pen on the table, and it's apparent to Bruce that he's stumbled into some kind of misstep that he was previously completely unaware of. He scratches at the back of his head and frowns. “Did you--”

“Look who I found,” Erik's voice drifts in, sounding less than pleased. Bruce turns his attention from Jane to the door, as Erik comes in, trailed by Tony. “He was hanging around outside when I got back.”

“You never write and you _never_ call,” Tony says, throwing his arms wide. Bruce rolls his eyes and Tony zeroes in on Jane. “Dr Foster, I'm a big fan. That paper on Raychaudhuri's theorem should have got you a PECASE, you were _robbed_.”

She smiles thinly. “Thanks.”

“Yikes, tough crowd,” Tony mutters. “Bruce, you wanna grab a beer, or something? Catch up?”

“Uh, I was kinda working on something with Jane...” he says, glancing at Jane.

She shrugs. “It's fine, we can finish this later.”

“You're sure?”

“She's sure, c'mon, before you disappear on me again,” Tony says, grabbing Bruce by the arm and dragging him out of his seat.

“Okay, well, see you later,” he says to Jane and Erik as he's pulled from the room.

-

“You've been adopted,” Tony observes as he drives them away from the lab. “It's not fair, I was going to adopt you, but then you had to go strike out on your own.”

“What?”

“Your little PhD-having science club you've got going on. I didn't realise that I wasn't good enough for you with just my lowly Masters in Electrical Engineering.”

Bruce sighs and settles in to the very comfortable passenger seat of Tony's convertible. “What?”

“God, you really can't take a joke, can you?”

“I can take funny ones,” he says, and watches the passing road.

“Uh huh.” Tony drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “So, where do you want to go?”

Bruce shrugs. “I don't mind. I'm not going to be drinking anything, though. I had kind of a bad experience with alcohol recently.”

“Well, this is gonna be fun,” Tony mutters.

“Sorry,” Bruce murmurs. “How'd you even know that I was at the lab?”

Tony looks at him incredulously. “You gotta know that S.H.I.E.L.D. has you under round the clock surveillance, right? They know that you're staying with Dr Selvig, they know that Dr Foster bought you that sweater...” His eyes linger on it for a moment, corners of his mouth pursed. Bruce tugs the sleeve of the brown fleece sweater over his hands. He likes it. “They even know that Crest is your mouthwash of choice.”

“Oh.” It's not like he thought he was living in perfect secrecy, but all laid out like that... It kind of sucks.

“You gonna freak out on me there, buddy?”

Bruce shakes his head. “No, I'm good. So, what's everyone doing these days?”

“Everyone? Oh, you mean _The Avengers_?” He grins. “I'm never getting over how awesome that is. Well, Steve is on a voyage of self-discovery around America, Natasha and Barton are doing spy stuff, Thor is doing space god stuff, I would assume, and you're doing whatever you're doing with Foster and Selvig. Exactly what are you doing with them?”

“Just helping out.”

“Uh huh. Unpaid.”

“They're not getting paid either, they've only got a research grant from S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Tony shrugs. “I just don't agree with doing work if you're not getting paid for it.”

“Oh, you capitalist,” Bruce murmurs.

“You can joke, but I have a _very_ good relationship with Stark Industries workers' union. You could find out for yourself, you know.”

“Huh?”

“I thought it was obvious in the helicarrier: I'd totally pay you to sit in a lab all day and create lots of hideously expensive, ground-breaking medicines and stuff. You could cure cancer! Or the common cold. People would _have_ to like me after that.”

“How did you get people liking _you_ out of _me_ curing cancer?”

“It's my name on the door, don't get above yourself.”

Bruce leans back more in his seat. It's hard to be irritated when he's so damn comfortable. “Right. Well, thanks for the offer, but I'm good.”

“Whatever, just trying to be a good friend,” Tony mutters. “Are you planning on sticking around, then?”

“I don't really know. Maybe?”

“You need money?”

“What?”

“Money, Bruce. I know you've been living out in the bush for the last few years, but I assume you're still familiar with the concept.”

“I am. I don't need money.” He does actually, he could really do with being able to buy his own food and clothes, but Tony already gave him the equivalent of a couple of thousand dollars, and somehow he managed to blow through it all, which doesn't make him feel very good about himself. He used to be pretty good at managing his money. 

“Well, okay, but Pepper told me I could give you as much money as I wanted. She's pretty grateful about the whole 'Hulk roar shock to the heart' thing.”

“Pepper?”

“My, uh...” Tony's eyebrows draw together for a moment. “My wife.”

“I didn't know you were married.”

“I wasn't,” he says, and glances over at Bruce, smiling. “I guess when you have a near death experience in another spacial dimension, from which your loved ones would never get your corpse back, some things get put into perspective a little.”

“When you put it like that...” Bruce murmurs.

Tony takes him back to Stark Tower, where Bruce feels some small satisfaction at getting up to the private floors despite his still sloppy appearance. Tony shows him around with barely restrained excitement, pointing out cutting edge gadgets and tech that none of his 'Luddite friends' are interested in.

“I love Pep more than _scotch_ ,” he says, “but she never wants to talk about Moore's law.”

Bruce smiles vaguely. “This place is incredible.”

“It's pretty nice,” Tony agrees. “If you want out of Selvig's spare room, you're welcome to a floor.”

“I think I've graduated from sleeping on floors,” he replies. Tony arches an eyebrow. “Oh, you meant...? No, I'm good.”

“You need to learn how to accept help,” Tony says.

If someone had told Bruce a year ago that he'd be offered help from Tony Stark, he'd have laughed in their face. Ross used Stark tech to hunt him down, and although Bruce had no illusions at the time that Tony worked closely enough with his company to actually know what was going on – even out in South American slums, people knew Tony's reputation – he still would never have thought that Tony would have _cared_ , and certainly not cared about _him_. 

“Why break the habit of a lifetime?” he settles on, and picks up a stray gauntlet, studying the scratches and grooves carefully.

“Lots of reasons. You don't want to get stuck not trusting people. There's always someone on your side. Trust me, I learnt that from personal experience.”

Tony's already turned away by the time Bruce looks back up, pulling up holographic images out of the air, striking up a one-sided argument with one of his robots.

“Trust... isn't something I'm so good at,” Bruce replies. “Never has been.”

“It's never too late for a change,” Tony says lightly, glancing over his shoulder for moment. Bruce shrugs and runs his fingers along a particularly deep scratch. He wonders what could have damaged the metal so badly. 

“Hey,” Tony adds, “if you're gonna fondle my tech, you could at least buy me a drink first, you know.”

-

Jane's still at the lab when Tony drops him back, denouncing him as a wet blanket and a bore. She doesn't even register Bruce coming in until he's at her side.

“Hey,” he murmurs, patting her on the shoulder.

“Oh! Oh, hey,” she says, smiling self-consciously. “How was your day out with Tony Stark?”

“Surprisingly sedate,” he says, and drags a chair around to sit down beside her. “How's it going?” he adds, nodding to her notebook.

“Still can't find a workaround for the trans-Planckian problem,” she says.

“You'll get it,” he says, and leans his elbows on the table, cradling his head in one hand. “Can I ask you something?”

“Okay.”

“What happened with Thor?”

She meets his eyes properly for the first time since he's come into the room, and drops her pencil. His immediate instinct is to apologise and let it go, but he bites it back and waits.

“Oh,” she says, “well.”

“Well?” he repeats.

She clicks her tongue. “Well, we had a... brief fling.”

“A brief fling with a god?”

“Alien,” she says. “And I mean, it wasn't really even fling. I hit him with my car and then we kissed once. I've spent more time with you than I did with him.”

“You hit him with your car?”

“It was a whole thing,” Jane says, shrugging.

“Okay.” Aside from vehicular assault, he can't imagine that anyone could just have a 'brief fling' with Thor, but he'd be willing to let it lie if it weren't for Jane's tense shoulders and downcast eyes. “And that's it?”

“That's... not it.” She sighs and scrubs her fingers through her hair. “He said he'd be back, and then... he wasn't. I waited a week for him, and then I started working on going _to_ him. And then he comes back two years later, and I don't hear a word from him. In fact, they sent me away to Tromsø for my 'safety' and let Erik get _brainwashed_.” She shakes her head. “It's not okay.”

“No,” he agrees. “I'm sorry.”

She nods slowly, and looks at him again. “I think you should go see Dr Ross.”

He blinks in surprise. “What?”

“I wasn't going to say anything, but... I only got to see Thor on news coverage of the invasion; nobody told me what was going on, he didn't come to see me... It hurt like hell. And you did the same thing to Dr Ross.”

“I didn't... mean to,” he mumbles.

“And I hope Thor didn't, either, but that doesn't change how I feel, does it?”

He bites his lips. “No, I guess not. But... it's different for me and Betty.”

“No, it isn't.”

“Yes, it is,” he argues, the beginnings of irritation growing in his chest.

Jane just shrugs.

“It is,” he pushes, “I'm too dangerous, she's better off without me.”

Jane doesn't look convinced. “That's not your decision to make.”

“Yes, it _is_ ,” he says, aware that he's starting to sound really whiny. “I won't let her get hurt again.”

“Oh, grow up,” she snaps, and Bruce rocks back a little in his chair. “You're hurting her worse right now.”

He blinks a couple of times, the itch of irritation in his chest rolling over and dying. He never has been any good with verbal arguments; he normally always backs down if someone pushes back.

When he doesn't answer, Jane sighs and shakes her head. “I'm going home,” she says, and flips her notebook closed with an audible smack of paper on paper.

“Oh... okay,” he says as she strides over to the door. “Bye?”

“Yeah,” she says, grabbing her coat off the hook, and then she's out the door.

-

The next day is full of awkward apologies, Jane for taking her bad mood out on him, and Bruce for asking questions that were too personal – in hindsight he's kind of appalled that he felt it was okay to pry like that. Erik eyes them suspiciously as they uncomfortably orbit each other for the rest of the day.

It weighs on his mind though, what she said, even after she tells him that she didn't have business dictating how he lives his life. He told himself when he left that it had been too long, that he'd changed too much since he last saw Betty, that he was emotionally unstable and borderline suicidal and who needed that in their life? But if their positions were reversed and he saw her on the television after so long and then didn't hear a word from her, he would have been devastated.

He hesitantly looks her up on one of the lab's computer, and discovers that she's working at Princeton now, doing research into the effects of radiation. Probably not a coincidence, he thinks.

He sits on this knowledge for a week, looking up the various papers she's published, finding an address for her in Edison, and the room number of her office. He makes and unmakes his decision to go see her five, six times, before he finally grabs his bag and tells Jane and Erik that he's going over to see Tony.

It takes a couple of hours, several subway trains, and one shuttle ride to get to Princeton, all done with Bruce's heart firmly in his throat.

He's been to Princeton before, for some long forgotten conference, but it still takes him some time to get his bearings, searching for Betty's office.

When he finds it, she isn't there, but it's only one in the afternoon, he tells himself, no reason to think that he's had a wasted trip. He grabs an abandoned newspaper, tugs his baseball cap low, and sits down on a nearby bench to wait for her. He waits for an hour, then two, then starts to feel that the security guard is getting a little interested in him, sitting there, reading the same page over and over. He turns a couple of pages and keeps the guard in his peripheral vision, ready to take off if he approaches him.

It's her laugh that he recognises first. He forgets all about pretending to read the paper, and drops it to his lap, fixing his gaze on her. Betty's on the phone, smiling at whatever's being said, door key in hand. She walks straight by him.

She walks straight by and doesn't even glance his way.

The newspaper crumples in his hands as he watches the door close behind her. He stands up, the newspaper falling forgotten to the ground, and the guard starts forward, but before either of them can do anything, someone jogs up to Betty's door and knocks, and she greets him with a 'come in!' that makes Bruce's heart clench. He takes one look at the guard, then turns around and leaves.

If the trip to New Jersey made him nervous, then the trip back just makes him fucking _angry_. Everything seems louder, people crush in closer, trains take longer to arrive. He has to force it back, squash the panic-laced anger and pain as far as it'll go, force his heart rate to slow before he makes it back to the lab.

He takes the elevator up, squeezing his eyes tightly closed until he reaches the eighth floor, and steps out. He swipes his card through the reader, steps into the lab, closes the door behind him gently.

“Bruce?” Jane calls.

“Yeah, just getting coffee,” he calls back, heading straight for the kitchen.

His hands are shaking as he switches on the coffee maker. He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes and tells himself to stop it, _stop it stop it stop it_ , and only removes them when the coffee is ready. His hands are still fluttering as he pours – his aim goes wide of the mug, scalding all over the back of his hand and his forearm.

“Ah!” he yelps, dropping the coffee pot. “Fuck!”

“Bruce?” Jane calls again.

“God _damnit_ ,” he growls, shoving the mug off the counter. It explodes into hot liquid and shards of ceramic across the tiled floor. 

“Bruce!” Jane shouts from the lab, and everything seems to tilt sideways, bleeding green. He can't control the shaking in his hands at all any more.

He bolts straight past her as she comes into the room to check on him. “Bruce?” she says as he runs out the door, heading as fast as he can for the fire escape. 

Eight _fucking_ floors up, why did he _never_ think about what a problem this would be? His balance is shot to hell, and he slams into walls and railings as he takes the stairs as fast as he can. He can feel his skin ripple and his muscles stretch and swell, and isn't even halfway down yet.

“Bruce!” Jane yells, her voice reverberating around the stairwell.

He spins around, slamming his hand into the wall to steady himself. The concrete crumbles around his fingers as he looks up at her, a couple of flights up. Her mouth is moving, but his mind is already starting to close in on itself, and he can't process the words properly. He takes off down the stairs, ever faster with the added power forcing its way out of him.

He makes it to the door out into the parking lot as his hands start to distort and distend; the door comes clean off in his hands as he rips it open, and he tosses the crumpled metal aside.

His vision blurs as he looks around, but he can't make out any people. In fact, its almost completely silent, except for his laboured breathing and the roar that he knows is coming from inside his head.

“Bruce!” Jane yells again, with an undertone that cuts through enough for him to hear it.

He turns around and backs up. “Go away,” he tells her, his voice likes rocks scraping against each other.

She looks... scared. Terrified. _Horrified_. His skin is twisting and swelling, his bones are breaking and rebuilding themselves, his clothes are ripping at their seams; he's _hideous_ like this, the in-between state of Bruce Banner and the... the Hulk, more hideous than either on their own. An aberration. 

Pain lances under his skin like fire, and his knees buckle as his kneecaps slide and break. “Go!” he roars at her, and that's the last thing he remembers before he's ripped apart.

-

He comes to on his back. He aches all over, like going a round with Ali and having the worst hangover combined, and that doesn't even really begin to describe how his _bones_ ache. It's cold, the concrete against his back – it is March, after all – but his front feels warm and covered. He moves his hands as much as they'll allow him, his joints still swollen like an arthritic old man's, and something soft glides over them. There's a pressure on his head, too, he realises as he comes back to himself more. He forces his eyes open, past the weights on his eyelids, and squints against the winter sun.

“Hey,” Jane says, and he realises that the pressure is her hand in his hair, stroking back and forth.

“He--” he says through sandpaper, and turns his head to cough. “Hello.”

“Feeling better?” she asks.

“Uh. I don't...” He frowns. She seems to be in one piece, even being affectionate with him, so he can't have done anything so bad. “Can you help me up?”

“Sure,” she says, and slides her hand to his back to help push him up. His shoulder blades pop back into place. He curls in on himself for a moment, coughing at the shock to his lungs, then looks at her.

“What did I do?” he asks.

“Mostly roared,” she says, smiling. She's touching his hair again, running her fingers through where it's starting to go grey and white at his temples. “You stomped your feet a little bit, too.” She nods to a radial pattern of cracks in the concrete a few feet away from them. “I think you were having a temper tantrum.”

“Oh,” he says, hugging his knees to his chest. “And that's it?”

“Well, and when you were done you came over to me and said 'Bruce sad', and sat down in front of me.”

“Oh,” he says again. Well, that's embarrassing.

“So, what happened?”

“What happened?” he repeats. “Well... I went to see Betty.”

Jane winces in sympathy.

“And... I was waiting outside her office, and, long story short, she didn't recognise me.”

“Oh, Bruce,” she says, and moves her hand to the back of his neck.

“I was too, uh... I was too frightened to say anything. And then I came back, and I was just really angry with myself, and your coffee maker was the last straw.”

“Okay,” she says, “good to know why there's coffee all over the kitchen floor, I guess.”

“Sorry.”

“Don't worry about it. I do think that you need to find a better way to express your emotions, though.”

“I _really_ do,” he agrees. He shifts on the concrete and frowns. His ass is really cold. He lifts the blanket up an inch and peers down. “Did, uh...”

“Those pants didn't stand a chance,” she says, grinning. “I saw _everything_.”

He hides his face in his hands, laughing softly. “Wow, I'm sorry, I normally wear looser clothes,” he says, muffled by his palms.

“Don't be. You don't, you know, you don't... have anything to be sorry for,” she says, and starts laughing too, cheeks turning pink.

“Oh God,” he mumbles. She puts her arm around him and gives him a one-armed hug.

-

It takes him a few days to find his equilibrium again; it always does after one of his 'incidents'. He sleeps for twelve hours solid immediately afterwards, back on the lab's couch, then spends the day after both hungry and nauseous. Erik, who thankfully wasn't in the lab when Bruce had his big green temper tantrum, watches him with even more suspicion. Jane quietly informs Bruce that S.H.I.E.L.D. have already dealt with the mess in the parking lot.

“I'm going to go see Betty again,” Bruce tells Jane, four days later.

Her eyebrows go high. “Is that a good idea?”

“I don't know, but I think I've got to do it. I'll try not to freak out this time, though.”

She twists her mouth. “Do you want me to come with you?”

He considers it for a second, having someone to keep him focused on the task, but he instinctively feels that he needs to keep these two parts of his life separate from one another.

“That's really nice of you, but I'll be okay.”

“Well...” She reaches out and squeezes his arm. “Good luck.”

He does the trip to New Jersey again, retracing the path he took, walks up to Betty's floor, passes the same security guard, and knocks on her door.

“Come in,” she calls.

 _Last chance to run, Bruce._ He shakes the thought away and opens the door.

“My offices hours are about to end, I'm afraid,” Betty says, eyes on her computer screen.

“Betty,” he says. His voice cracks on the last syllable.

She doesn't move anything but her eyes, sliding over to him slowly. Her face twitches. “Lock the door,” she says quietly.

He fumbles behind himself, twisting the bolt closed, never taking his eyes off her. “Betty, I...”

She shakes her head and gets up from her desk. He clenches his hands to fists at his side as she approaches him. She reaches out and cups a hand around his jaw, stroking her thumb over his cheek, and he starts crying. Just a little bit, and he is, at least, aware that he's doing it this time. Her eyes are red-rimmed too as she leans over and hugs him.

He clings onto her, buries his face in her neck, and cries. He's not sure how long he hangs on for before Betty gives him an extra hard squeeze and steps back.

“Oh, wow,” he mumbles, wiping at his face. “Sorry about that.”

Betty's answering smile looks pained. “Bruce, where have you been? I saw you... on the TV in May. That was almost a year ago.”

“I know, I know.” He shakes his head. “I was scared. I ran away again.”

She nods. “Sit down,” she says, and leads him to her couch. She keeps her hands on him, as if he'll disappear if she isn't touching him, which is a fear that's well-grounded for her, he's sure. She strokes his arms and flicks her eyes over his face. He stays still for her inspection. “You look good,” she says finally.

“I look old,” he replies, running his fingers through his greying hair. Three years ago, his hair was the solid dark brown it had always been and he had almost perfect vision; now his hair is shot through all over with grey and white, and he can't always see right even with his glasses on. His working theory is that the antidote Sterns gave him put such an intense strain on his body, that it accelerated the ageing process. Then again, maybe he just can't come to terms with the inexorable slide towards death.

“It makes you look distinguished,” she says.

“That's one way of putting it.”

She smiles briefly and drops her hands to his hands, folding their palms together. “Where are you staying?”

“Do you remember Dr Selvig?”

“From Culver?”

“Yeah. I'm staying in his spare room and helping out with a project he's working on.”

She frowns a little. “Is it okay?”

“Yeah, he and Jane – that's his colleague – they're being very good to me, especially considering that I don't have any money and they're paying for everything.”

“If you need money...” she starts, and he shakes his head.

“God, no, I'm... I'm fine. I've got Tony Stark trying to push wads of cash on me, I'll be fine.”

“Tony Stark?”

“I kind of saved his life,” he says, and shrugs.

“Okay,” she says, eyebrows, high. “So...”

He clutches tighter at her hands. “I'm sorry, Betty, for everything.”

“It's okay.”

“No, it's not.”

“Maybe not,” she concedes, “but you're here now.”

“Yeah... Are you okay? How have you been? You're still so beautiful, you know.”

She smiles. “I'm okay, I've got a teaching position here, it pays pretty well, and a research grant. It feels good to have a fresh start away from Culver.”

“Has your dad...?”

“I haven't seen or heard from him in three years,” she says. Her grip on his hands tighten. “And I don't intend to again.”

“Are you... are you seeing anyone?”

“Not at the moment. Are you?”

“No, not... not really.” He frowns, then looks up at her. It feels like something's come free inside of him, jangling around nervously. “We're over, aren't we?”

“I think so, yeah.”

He ducks his head and breaths out, feeling hot tears threatening to spill again. It's like a weight he didn't know was there being lifted off his chest. It doesn't exactly feel good, it leaves behind the shock of a crushing pain, but it is a relief.

“Bruce?” she asks, and cups her hand around his cheek. “Are you okay?”

He closes his eyes and savours her touch, maybe for the last time, he thinks, at least like this. “I just really needed to hear that.”

“I still love you, you know,” she says,

“I love you too,” he replies, leaning into her hand. “God, so much.”

She smiles beautifully, a smile he's known since he was a teenager, one that felt like it was just for him in those early days when he didn't know how to be touched and touch back in return. He was an emotional train wreck when she first met him, and continued to bounce between highs and lows until his internalised anger issues took physical form, and hadn't that turned out well for both of them? He was a difficult person to love long before the other guy, but he's so glad that she took the time.

Betty runs a thumb over his stubbly chin and drops her hand. “So, what's going on with this person that you're 'not really' seeing?”

“Oh,” he says, “ha, um, she's just a friend.”

“Who is she?”

“Uh, she's, uhhh,” he stammers, to Betty's barely contained amusement. “I'm working with her.”

“Okay...” she says, raising her eyebrows. “And...?”

“And... I don't know. I told her about Brian.”

“Wow.”

He shifts uncomfortably. “I was drunk.”

“You were drunk when you told me, too.”

“I was?”

Betty nods. “On wine coolers.”

“I don't remember that.”

“I'm not surprised.” She lets go of his hands and pats him on the knee. “Have you eaten, do you want to go get lunch? If it's safe for you, I mean.”

“It's safe.” He's almost got used to his shadowy S.H.I.E.L.D. buddy. He or she is actually becoming a comforting presence. “I'd love to have lunch with you, Betty.”

-

They linger over lunch, spending a good two hours or more eating and talking about the past. It takes turns for the painful and the utterly heart-wrenching, but he feels so much lighter by the end of it. Betty walks with him back to the station, gives him her number, insists on getting the lab's number from him, since he doesn't have a cell phone, and they promise not to lose touch with each other again. He isn't sure whether it's an empty promise or not on his part, but he's willing to give it a shot.

He gets back to the lab in the late afternoon, half hoping that Jane and Erik might be gone already and he'll be able to crash out on the couch. No such luck, of course.

“Hey,” Jane says as he drags himself in. 

He feels absolutely drained and wrung out from the afternoon, and it's all he can do to collapse on the couch. He closes his eyes, and a couple of seconds later he can hear her soft footsteps padding over to him.

“Bruce?” she says.

“I'm fine,” he murmurs. Evidently she doesn't believe him, because a moment later the couch cushion dips. He opens his eyes and looks at her.

“What happened with Dr Ross?” she asks.

“Nothing. I mean, not nothing, but... it was good. There was a lot of tears, mostly mine. It was very... cathartic.”

She nods slowly. “I was kind of hoping you wouldn't come back tonight, you know.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Thanks.”

She blushes a little. “Not like that. I just mean, I hoped that you two would make up, and that you'd have somewhere else to stay tonight.”

“No,” he says. “It's over between us. Definitely over.”

“Oh, Bruce,” she sighs, and wraps an arm around his shoulders. “I'm sorry.”

“No, no, it's okay, really. Me and Betty were together on and off – and more on than off – for fifteen years, since I was eighteen, and it was amazing when I was able to...” He shakes his head and sighs. “But something always got in the way, even before the other guy.” He looks back at Jane. “I know people say that good things don't come easy, but I don't think they're meant to be this hard, either.”

The corners of her mouth turn down and she curls her arm around his neck, threading her fingers through his hair, and tipping his head against her shoulder. “I'm still sorry,” she says.

“Yeah,” he says, slumping into her. “Me too.”

Erik comes through a couple of minutes later, and doesn't even bother to say anything.

-

He tries to make himself as unobtrusive as he can at Erik's. Which is pretty unobtrusive, actually: he shared a suite with three football players his sophmore year, and they expressed surprise at finding him in the kitchenette during finals, because they were sure he'd moved out at the beginning of the semester.

His welcome is definitely getting worn out, though. He's eating Erik's food, admittedly not very much of it, and sleeping in his spare bed, and Erik is a grumpy bastard at the best of times, and these aren't the best of times. Bruce just tries to keep out of his way until he can figure out how to earn some real money and afford to rent somewhere himself.

“Bruce,” Erik greets him early in the morning, a few days after seeing Betty. It's _very_ early, no more than five fifteen, which is normally when Bruce squirrels his breakfast away, washes everything up, and heads out soon afterwards.

“Hey...” he says, glancing at his bowl of cereal, and the empty carton of milk in his hand. “Uh, I was going to go out and get more milk before you got up... Do you want my cereal?”

“I'll have toast,” Erik says.

“Okay,” Bruce says, shuffling to one side as Erik goes over to the fridge. “You're up early.”

“Couldn't sleep. Bruce,” he adds, grabbing the butter from the fridge.

“Yeah?”

“Don't you think you're a little old for Jane?”

“Oh,” he says. No point in denying anything, really, even though everything has been completely innocent, if a little oddly affectionate. “I hadn't really thought about it.”

'Old' is code for 'big green rage monster', he's aware of this. His cereal is getting soggy.

“Mm, maybe you should,” Erik says without looking at him.

“Maybe,” Bruce echoes.

-

Jane has a huge map of the nine realms that she plotted out from a sketch Thor did for her. It's made up of dozens of pieces of paper taped together, until it's too large for the drafting table and hangs over the sides when she spreads it out. Bruce has caught her looking at it before, her eyes travelling up to the hastily scribbled 'Asgard' at the top before sighing and rolling it up again.

He finds her plotting more of it out in the evening. Erik's gone home already, and Bruce is just trying to stay out of his way some – it's becoming a little bit unbearably awkward at his apartment. Bruce thinks maybe he should take Tony up on that job offer.

“Hey,” he says, coming up beside Jane.

“Oh, hi,” she says, stepping back from the constellation she was adding to the map. 

“It's beautiful,” he says, nodding to it.

“Yeah, I'm an artist,” she replies flippantly.

“It is beautiful,” he insists. “Your work is beautiful.”

“Oh, well, uh, thanks,” she says, pushing her hand through her hair and smiling sheepishly.

“It's just that...” He frowns. “It's just so _good_ , like, uh... I'm not explaining myself very well. It's like, my work only ever destroyed people and relationships and stuff. You're building something amazing. It's beautiful,” he repeats.

Her hand finds his and she curls her fingers against his palm. They smile at each other for a moment, and it feels so _inevitable_. He leans forward slowly, biting the inside of his cheek, and kisses her, closed mouth, just for a second.

“Sorry,” he says, pulling away a little.

“Sorry for what?”

“I don't know, pre-emptive strike?”

She laughs, and tugs him in again. Her hands clasp around his waist, and he tentatively touches her hair, which is as soft and silky as it looks, while she urges his mouth open with her tongue. He's a little rusty, but he's been told that he's a good kisser. Betty used to say that he had the lips for it. He tips his head to one side and scrunches her hair in his hand, pressing his nose to her cheek.

After a couple of minutes, she leans back a couple of inches, and looks at his half-lidded eyes. “Okay,” she breathes, cheeks pink. “So, do you, do you want to... come back to mine?”

He licks his lips. “Yeah... yeah, okay.”

-

When he went home for the first time with Betty, knowing that they were going to have sex, he was nervous wreck, blushing and babbling and saying all the stupidest things that floated across his brain.

When he and Jane take the subway back to her apartment, he's calm, if a touch awkward. They keep looking at each other and smiling, and she takes his hand when they get to her building, leading him up to her apartment.

“Do you want to have sex?” she asks, once she's got the front door closed.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yes.”

She kicks off her shoes and strips her coat and t-shirt off without preamble, then starts helping him with his. She is, he realises anew as he looks at the dip of her waist, _tiny_ , and he says as much.

“You're not exactly huge yourself,” she says, trailing her fingers up and down his bare sides.

“No, but...” He shakes his head. She's so breakable. “What if I hurt you?”

“I'm not that small, Bruce,” she says shortly.

“Well... you kind of are,” he says. It's the wrong thing to say. Her mouth sets into a flat line. “Sorry?” he says carefully.

She sighs heavily. “Look, it's okay, I just, I don't like being called 'tiny', okay? My ex used to call me his 'pocket rocket'.”

Bruce frowns. That actually sounds kind of cute.

“I hated it,” she adds.

He puts his hands up. “I will never call you 'pocket rocket'. In fact, I probably won't use endearments of any kind.”

She nods decisively, then grins at him. “You're very hairy.”

He looks down at his chest. “I am.”

She spreads her hands over his chest. “I like it.”

“Thank you,” he says, and she laughs, tugging him into her bedroom by the waist band of his pants.

They get as far as some serious heavy petting: Jane climbs into his lap, getting a couple of inches on him, tips his head back, and goes to town on his neck. He's going to be covered in love bites tomorrow, which is going to be embarrassing, but his quiet, steady panting probably isn't dissuading her any.

He is achingly hard against her thigh, almost desperately so. He lets Jane take her time, though, savouring how she touches him, knowing that the pay off will be that much sweeter for the run up.

“Okay,” she says against the juncture of his jaw and ear. There's nothing especially special about it, but he flushes with arousal all the same. She sits back, carefully avoiding his erection. “I guess we should have the sex talk.”

“I'm not a virgin,” he says quickly.

“No, I guessed,” she says, grinning. “I mean, sexual health and things. I guess it's a little different with you, though. So, uh, I'm just going to ask it: can you have sex?”

“Oh. Yeah, I can. I thought for a while that a raised heartbeat would trigger the transformation, but there's a huge emotional component. Actually, generally during and after orgasm I can't transform at all. Endorphins and stuff.”

“Good endorphins,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“And your, um, your sperm is...”

“Not irradiated,” he finishes. “I tested it.”

“Okay, good, I just, you know, I had to ask.”

He nods and pushes himself up to sit a bit more easily. “Oh, sure. The gamma radiation did render me infertile, though.” And what a relief that was when he found out. “You don't want kids, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Good, me either. We should probably use a condom just to be really safe, though.”

Jane nods, pressing her thumbs lightly against his hip bones. “Yeah, okay. So, how's long it been for you?”

He does a quick calculation in his head. “About.... seven years? I mean, I guess it depends what you mean: I haven't penetrated anyone in that long, but I've got people off and stuff.”

He's always found it pretty easy to talk about sex in purely objective terms – consequence of being a biologist. Jane's blushing pretty hard, but she's holding up well, too.

“Three years for me,” she says.

“I win.”

She tuts. “It's not a competition.”

“So, was it Thor, because there's no way I'm gonna measure up to that,” he asks.

“No, I never got that far with him,” she says, and shrugs. She looks a little sad. Bruce isn't the only one with unresolved issues in this room.

“You sure you want to do this?” he asks.

She takes a deep breath and kisses him. “Yes. Are you?”

“ _Yes_ ,” he says with a vehemence that makes her laugh. 

She slips out of his lap and roots around in her night stand for one lonely condom. “My last one,” she says, holding it up between her fingers.

“So, I only have one shot at this?”

“Pretty much,” she says, and tosses it to him. He tears the foil open and tugs his pants down. Jane raises her eyebrows. “Doesn't look like you're going to have any performance anxiety,” she says, then giggles. “I can't believe I just said that.”

“I don't mind,” he says, “compliment my dick all you like, it doesn't get enough love.” And _he_ can't believe _he_ just said that. He shakes his head and grins. “Okay, let's stop talking about my dick. How should we... do this?”

Jane frowns.

“I mean, is there a particular position that you prefer? Do you want to be on top?”

She scratches at the back of her head. “I don't really have a preference, to be honest. I haven't really, you know... I studied a lot in college. Let's just, uh, see where it goes?”

He shrugs. “Okay.”

It's a little awkward at first, with the added awareness of each other's now totally naked bodies, but after a couple of minutes they fall into a rhythm, slow and steady and grinding against each other. They stay mostly sitting up, Bruce slinging his arm around her waist to keep her in his lap. It's a bit of a novel experience for him: Betty's a couple inches taller than him already and for most of their relationship they were practically the same weight (and he, of course, had the noodly arms of a basement dweller), so there wasn't really any opportunities for him to show off any masculine prowess. Of which he was sorely lacking in, anyway.

Jane digs her fingers in his hair and tightens her thighs around him, rocking her hips in ever smaller circles, until he has to fight to keep his eyes open.

“Ahhh, slow down,” he groans, loosening his grip on her waist a little.

“Are you gonna...?” she asks, looking faintly alarmed.

He chuckles breathlessly. “I'm gonna do the other thing,” he says.

“Oh,” she says, and then she looks a little sly. She slows down all right, drops her mouth to his jaw and sucks, until it feels like he's going to go fucking crazy. And it's so sweetly frustrating, the sensation, and such a relief to be able to feel it, to lose himself in pounding hearts and sticky skin and tangled limbs.

It's not fair for him to have all the fun, though. He slides his free hand down to cup the crease of her leg for a moment, giving Jane time to react, then presses his thumb into her carefully.

“Oh,” she says in surprise as he finds her clit, then again. “Oh. Oh oh.” It's all very polite at first, until she clenches around his hand and grips onto his hair like a vice. She rocks her hips into him with quick snapping motions, and he rubs faster and harder, until he can feel her muscles twitch and tighten. “Ah,” she huffs, pushing down against him. She wraps her other arm around his waist and curls into him, shuddering.

He's pleased with himself, he always was good at getting girls off and it's nice to see that some things haven't changed, but it all just serves to make him even harder, the kind of hard that pushes out all other thoughts except pumping into something and getting some relief. His self-control feels like an elastic band stretched beyond its breaking point, about to snap in spectacular fashion.

Jane sits back and cups his face in her hands, crushing their mouths together again, and sucks his bottom lip between her teeth. She bites at it a little, in rhythm with the slow rocking of her hips, and he just loses it, coming hard enough that the insides of his eyelids are speckled with light. He buries his face in her chest and rides it out with jerky movements, while she scratches her fingernails gently over his hair and back.

It takes him a while to get himself back together again. He's so intimately aware of the sensation of being torn apart from the inside, of his body being the constant enemy, he'd almost forgotten how _good_ it could make him feel.

“Oh,” he murmurs, uncurling a little. “Okay, wow.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, and kisses him softly. 

They untangle their limbs, clean themselves up, and fall back into her bed by nine. He's exhausted, could fall asleep as soon as his head hits the pillow, but Jane seems pretty bright-eyed, and he doesn't want to be one of those, 'orgasm then roll over and go to sleep' clichés.

“You're pretty good at that,” Jane says.

He smiles sleepily, pillowing his cheek on his hand. “Lot of female biology classes in college.”

“Everyone should take those,” she says, mirroring him, lying on her side. “Don was a doctor, though, and he _never_ did anything like that.”

“Don?”

“My ex.”

“What did he look like?”

She frowns, but gives it some thought. “Um, blond? I lent Thor some of his clothes, so I guess they're about the same size?”

He nods. “Well, good looking people don't have to make so much of an effort.”

She huffs and pushes him lightly in the shoulder. “You're good looking!”

“I'm okay. I was kind of cute when I was younger.”

She rolls her eyes and shifts in closer. “You're cute _now_.”

“Sure,” he murmurs, eyelids drooping.

“You're not listening to me,” Jane says, with a laugh in her voice as he drifts off. He smiles into pillow, and Jane pats him on the head before he falls asleep.

-

He wakes up with his knees against his chest, and his head tucked down, with the blanket wrapped tightly around him like a cocoon. It's surprisingly hard to pull himself out of sleep; he feels so peaceful, for once, completely aware of where he is and what's going on that it feels safe enough to just lie there with his eyes closed for a little while longer. The only reason he does get up is because his stomach insists on it.

The other side of the bed is a rumpled pile of sheets and blankets. An empty pile. Bruce scoots to the edge of the bed and checks the clock: ten-thirty am. Maybe she's gone to work already. He doesn't think this was a one time deal. He hopes not, at least.

He snags his boxers and fleece sweater from where they've migrated from the floor to the back of a chair, and puts them on, then grabs his socks, too, because it's damn cold, and steps out into the hall. He pads into the kitchen and peers his head around the doorway carefully. It's empty. His chews on his lip, wondering if it's okay to raid her fridge a little.

“Hey,” Jane says from behind him.

He starts and turns around. “Oh, hey, I thought that you might...” he trails off and smiles. He feels suddenly, inexplicably shy.

“Have gone out and left my conquest to wake up alone?” she finishes.

He grins nervously and tugs his sleeves over his hands. “It's cold in here.”

“Yeah, the heating only works when it wants to. Coffee?”

“Okay,” he says, and follows her into the kitchen. He tries to help out, but gets swiftly directed to the table to sit down.

“So,” she says, and smiles at him over her shoulder. He smiles back, twisting his fingers together. “Do you always sleep like that?”

“Like...? Oh, like a dormouse? Yeah.”

“That's not exactly how I was going to put it...” she says, bringing over two cups of coffee.

“That's what one of my college room mates used to call it, I guess it kind of stuck. I'm generally quite a mousy person, though, so...”

“That's not true,” Jane says disapprovingly, but she lets it go. “Isn't it uncomfortable?”

He lifts his hands in a shrug. “I guess I've just been doing it for so long that... Sometimes when, uh, when Brian was really drunk, Mom used to sleep in my bed with me, and my bed was really small. And sometimes I used to sleep outside their bedroom door to try and stop...” He lifts the corner of his mouth and huffs. “This is a depressing morning after conversation. Let's talk about something else.”

Jane turns the big eyes she had on him down to her coffee. “Yeah, sorry. So... we had sex.”

“Yes, we did.”

“We should do it again sometime.”

“Yes, we should.”

She grins and pushes his leg with her foot. “Then it's settled.”

They sip their coffees in companionable silence, and Bruce likes to think of himself as somewhat highly evolved (ha) but there's a strong undercurrent to all his thoughts of: 'just had sex'. Sex sex sex.

“I'm gonna ask Tony for a job,” he blurts out, before he devolves entirely back into a teenager.

Jane looks caught off guard. “Uh, okay? Aren't you happy working with us?”

“No, no, I am, but... I need to start paying my way.”

“If you need money, we can pay you,” she says.

“No, you're not getting paid for doing the research, there's no reason I should. I just... literally have nothing to my name, and I think I should probably do something about that before I burn all my bridges.”

“You're not going to burn your bridges.”

“Well, Erik's is smouldering.”

She sits forward, frowning. “Has he said something?”

“No... I mean, sort of? He suggested that I might be too old for you.”

Her nostrils flare. “Oh, did he? You know, he vetted my high school boyfriends because he figured that's what dads did, even though my father would never have threatened to run top secret experiments on greasy teenage boys.”

“Well, that is a bit overkill, but I can't blame him for being irritated with me. I'm eating his food, I'm creeping around his apartment, I'm not paying for anything. He's getting pissed. Tony offered me a job a while ago and it's nepotism, but I'm gonna take what I can get. And then maybe I'll be able to pay for my own food and rent somewhere like a real boy.”

“Well, okay, I guess I get that, but...” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, then does it again when it falls forward, then just gives up. “Apartment-hunting sucks. You could just, you know, you could move in with me. At least while you're looking. I liked having you here before. You're very... tidy.”

“Um.” He drums his fingertips on his cup and bites the inside of his lip. “I liked being here. Um. You're sure you want a sometimes rage monster living with you?”

She grins. “I'm a rage monster too, when I don't get the grants that I need.”

He can't help it: he smiles back, which pretty much seals the deal. “I'm paying rent, though, I'm not going to keep living off you.”

“Hey, I'm not going complain about someone paying half the rent,” she says.

“I don't know about _half_ ,” he murmurs, arching an eyebrow.

“You'll be paying all of it, if you're not careful,” she says, and stands up, crossing the short distance to him. She bends at the waist, tucks another strand of hair behind her ear that's fallen forward, and gives him a light kiss on the lips before going back for her coffee. “I've got a ton of work to go over, you want to come help me?”

“Sure,” he says, getting up to follow her out.

“Oh,” she adds, already out the door, “grab a couple bags of chips, we're gonna work out that trans-Planckian problem.”

“In a day?”

She leans back round the doorframe. “In a morning,” she says, grinning.

**Author's Note:**

> In case anyone missed it - and it was easy to miss - in the scene where Jane, Erik, and Darcy are sitting onthe roof in _Thor_ , Erik makes a brief comment about a colleague who's an expert in gamma radiation. I decided to run with it, since _The Avengers_ didn't.
> 
> (PS: I know very little about science, and very very little about theoretical physics, so any terms used might be, and probably are, incorrect.)


End file.
